Comment by DSingularity
3 days ago
I met an old Palestinian man who still works manual, hard labor. Both his sisters were killed by Israeli Air Force bombing. His family was displaced from Haifa during the nakba. Most his elder brothers were kicked out of Palestine decades ago due to their resistance. Do you know what he spent most of his time in discussion complaining about? How his best friend hurt him years ago and caused him lots of frustrating harm. His best friend was an Israeli. They worked together for many years. He is fully fluent in Hebrew. He had so much to say about his old friend that I think what he hated the most was losing his friend.
People move on if you let them.
Stop killing Palestinians. Stop the settler terrorism. Share Jerusalem and stop antagonizing its people. Admit that your Likud party are a bunch of Fascist, genocidal, maniacs and prosecute them. Give Palestinians the right to return.
Let some time pass and many Palestinians will befriend Israelis and vice versa. And when a Palestinian militant group tries to resist with violence again don’t start murdering civilians. Just treat with them. With time the Palestinians will demand that the violent resistance stops. People just want to live.
As you allude to in your story, Palestinians being friends with Israelis was the norm thirty years ago - there was less separation and Israelis and Palestinians more freely interacted.
But you seem to blame Israel for the situation no longer being this way. You say:
> People move on if you let them
So why is the situation worse now than it was before?
The reason, from an Israeli perspective, is that Israel started a peace process with the Palestinians in which it tried to arrive at a reasonable solution, but the Palestinians eventually refused every offer, including very generous offers, and walked away. Not only that, they launched the second intifada, the deadliest wave of terror attacks on Israel.
Israel tried a different way with Gaza - we can't reach a deal, so fine - we'll just leave Gaza completely. It uprooted all Jewish citizens of Gaza, dismantled all settlements, and left. Gaza then proceeded to elect Hamas, which is sworn to Israel's destruction, and started almost immediately shooting rockets at Israel.
So as an Israeli liberal - I absolutely prefer peace and want to get to a peaceful resolution with the Palestinians. But it's honestly unclear to me that we have any partner on the Palestinian side that is willing to live side-by-side with Israel.
>And when a Palestinian militant group tries to resist with violence again don’t start murdering civilians. Just treat with them.
You know that this is precisely what Israel did with Hamas - just dealt with them with them. This is what many people are now criticizing Israel for.
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